The Yellow Ticket - Miami Premiere

The Yellow Ticket is a live multi-media concert event featuring a new
score by violinist Alicia Svigals that reanimates a silent cinema
classic. Set in Poland and Tsarist Russia, the 1918 film—starring
legendary actress Pola Negri—portrays a woman’s struggle to overcome
adversity in a story of secret identities, heroic measures, and
triumphant love.

Svigals has crafted a lush composition, which
she performs live with jazz piano virtuoso Marilyn Lerner. The work is
inspired by klezmer and other Eastern European folk traditions,
20th-century classical composers such as Béla Bartók and Ernest Bloch,
and contemporary improvisation.About the film:

Remarkably progressive for its time, The Yellow Ticket
(1918) is the first film to explore Jewish discrimination in Tsarist
Russia and stars famed Polish actress Pola Negri, Hollywood’s first
European silent film star. It tells the story of Lea, a young woman who
hides her Jewish heritage to study medicine. Pushed towards prostitution
to pay the rent, Lea is saved by a beloved professor with a secret of
his own.

Svigals noted, “This wonderful and
strange work is a story about Jews, but made by and for non-Jews. I
wished to be the missing Jewish artistic collaborator who might bridge
this gap by providing authentic sounds drawn from the collective Jewish
soul. More than that, I felt my task was to use the soundtrack to
clarify the story’s structure, and through the music to arouse in the
viewer the profound emotions depicted in the film across a gulf of
sensibility and time.”

The Yellow Ticket,
directed by Victor Janson and Eugen Illès and filmed partly on location
in German-occupied Warsaw during the last year of World War I, was one
of Pola Negri’s first films for Germany’s leading studio UFA and was
released in the U.S. by Paramount in 1922. The film is based on Abraham
Schomer’s 1911 Yiddish melodrama, Afn Yam un ”Ellis Island” (At
Sea and Ellis Island) which was subsequently produced on Broadway in
1914 in an un-authorized English-language version written by Michael
Morton.

The Yellow Ticket
production was commissioned by the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s New
Jewish Culture Network, a league of North American performing arts
presenters committed to the creation and touring of innovative
projects.

The Yellow Ticket debuted at the Washington
Jewish Music Festival, presented by the Washington DC Jewish Community
Center, through a commission made possible by the Arthur Tracy “The
Street Singer” Endowment Fund. The New Jewish Culture Network has
received major support from the Howard and Geraldine Polinger Family
Foundation. Additional support is provided by Sylvia M. Neil, the Milken
Family Foundation, and other donors.

The film The Yellow Ticket is used with permission by Bright Shining City Productions.

National outreach partners for The Yellow Ticket tour include the Polish Cultural Institute New York and the Goethe-Institut New York. Among the media sponsors is the Forward.